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Andorra Telecom Optimizes Converged Billing by Deploying Additional Netcracker BSS Capabilities

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Netcracker Technology announced recently that Andorra Telecom has gone live with a BSS expansion by implementing Netcracker’s Online Charging System and Voucher Management solution to consolidate its pre-paid and post-paid customers onto a single converged billing platform. The BSS solutions will integrate with Andorra Telecom’s already extensive suite of end-to-end Netcracker BSS and OSS solutions. [Read more…]

Vivo Accelerates Service Delivery Capabilities by Upgrading Netcracker Solution

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Netcracker Technology has announced that Vivo, the largest telecommunications service provider in Brazil, is upgrading Netcracker’s Activation Manager solution to streamline the process of bringing innovative new services to market. The upgraded solution’s newer features will support Vivo?s long-term business growth strategies and reduce total cost of ownership. [Read more…]

Netcracker Brings Digital Transformation Focus to #MWC16

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Netcracker Technology announced today that it will showcase its portfolio of digital transformation solutions and services at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. During the event, Netcracker will highlight its experience and capabilities as a strategic partner that helps service providers successfully embark on complete digital transformations through the use of end-to-end data-driven BSS/OSS capabilities and innovative software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions. [Read more…]

TOT Combines Pre-Paid, Post-Paid, Mobile and Fixed Billing with Convergent NetCracker Solution

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NetCracker Technology announced today that TOT Public Company Limited has implemented NetCracker’s Convergent Billing Solution to combined their pre-paid and post-paid fixed and mobile rating, charging and billing processes. This consolidated platform will allow TOT to improve their billing accuracy, flexibility and agility to deliver a superior customer experience. [Read more…]

T-Mobile Netherlands Implements NetCracker Product Management Solution

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NetCracker Technology announced that T-Mobile Netherlands has implemented NetCracker’s Product Management solution in order to not only obtain a centralized view of their product catalog, but to also enhance their product management capabilities. This platform will enable T-Mobile Netherlands to simplify the way it manages products across their lifecycles, from development to production to retirement. [Read more…]

Bright House Networks Deploys NetCracker CRM Solution

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Bright House Networks has deployed NetCracker’s eCommerce and CRM solutions in order to enhance the customer experience and deliver increased personalization through more effective and automated customer engagements. The offerings will not only simplify customer management by allowing customers to self-manage their service requirements, but will also enable Bright House Networks to streamline their sales and order fulfillment process to maximize efficiency and customer experience. [Read more…]

O2 in the UK Extends NetCracker Hosted Managed Services Partnership

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NetCracker Technology announced recently that Telefónica UK, which operates as O2 in the UK, has agreed to extend the use of NetCracker’s Revenue Management solution through a hosted managed services model for two new significant initiatives. By using NetCracker’s Revenue Management solution and Hosted Managed Services, O2 will provide rating, billing and mediation capabilities for a nationwide smart metering program across 53 million devices as well as a large-scale partner revenue-sharing ecosystem, which allows Telefónica customers to purchase third-party products and services that can be charged directly to their monthly phone bill. [Read more…]

Slovak Telekom Selects NetCracker

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NetCracker Technology has expanded its billing relationship with Slovak Telekom, the largest telecommunications service provider in Slovakia. Slovak Telekom will leverage NetCracker’s Revenue Management solution to bring its fixed and mobile billing processes onto a single, end-to-end platform. [Read more…]

Suddenlink Communications Leverages NetCracker’s Managed Services to Improve Business AgilityAbout NetCracker Technology

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NetCracker Technology announced that Suddenlink Communications, one of the largest cable broadband services providers in the United States, has expanded its partnership with NetCracker by engaging in a multi-year managed services program. As part of this initiative, NetCracker will deliver its cutting-edge CRM solution to Suddenlink via a fully hosted managed service model with industry-leading SLAs. [Read more…]

Virtualization Needs Strong Use Cases and Ongoing Industry Support to Push Forward

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As SDN & OpenFlow World Congress winds down, the future of SDN and NFV will be determined by continued hard work and viable business cases.

This week at SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, a lot of talk was devoted to what’s still needed to get virtualization technologies out of the lab and proof of concept stage and into full-scale commercial productions. This includes multi-vendor support, partnerships, standards and a more open environment. There is movement on each of those fronts, but there’s still a way to go, and in the meantime questions around the business cases and real-world viability of SDN and NFV still swirl around the industry.

Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst at 451 Research, said that now that the industry has been working with SDN for about seven years and NFV for about three, deployments have finally gone beyond just the theoretical. He said the level of maturity in the technologies and standards, along with a wide range of operators deploying functionality around these capabilities, means SDN and NFV have hit their stride.

However, he cautioned, what’s happening today is part of a much longer journey along which the industry is probably only at the midpoint if even that far. It may still be early days, but Hanselman said the industry must continue to look ahead to areas such as improving scale and capabilities in terms of application sophistication, true service orchestration, a broader ecosystem and greater integration with BSS and OSS.

With interesting use cases such as the Internet of Things (IoT) already here, now’s the time to seize those opportunities to realize the benefits of virtualization.

The Internet of Everything
IoT is a natural use case that will greatly benefit from virtualization technologies. As sensors, wearables and other devices proliferate in applications ranging from connected cars and homes to fitness trackers and package delivery, among just a very few examples, issues such as traffic volume, latency, reliability and performance will be significant. Considering the IoT is expected to quickly ramp up to many billions of devices in the next five years, the network issues alone are daunting.

But by bringing in NFV, operators will be better able to optimize traffic management. For example, by managing bursts of traffic – which will be a common occurrence with many IoT applications – at the network edge, they will be able to manage performance degradation much more efficiently. In addition, operators will be able to offload control and data plane traffic using vEPC, while SDN will bring dynamic provisioning to the table, which will allow for real-time capacity management by allocating bandwidth as needed. SDN will also enable security enforcement at the network edge to provide a more tightly controlled environment for IoT applications.

Commercial Deployments Ramping Up
Another use case for virtualization comes in the form of the virtual CPE (vCPE), which Telefónica plans to roll out in 2016, according to Francisco-Javier Ramon Salguero, Head of Network Virtualization at the operator’s GCTO Unit. He said that while the industry as a whole might be in the middle of the virtualization journey, and not quite to the end goals of better programmability and overall simplicity of network operations, Telefónica belief has been that it’s not enough to discuss the technology; instead, it’s necessary to get your hands dirty in order to move virtualization efforts forward. And with today’s access network getting more and more complicated, vCPE brings a strong business case to operators.

Overall, the mood at SDN & OpenFlow World Congress has been one of optimism but tempered by the reality that the work is far from over. But given the intense commitment on the part of operators, vendors, standards organizations and others, by the next time this event convenes there will likely be many more real-world examples alongside even more interesting and innovative use cases.

*NetCracker Technology submits this article live from the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress

Operators Make Their Virtualization Demands

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At SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, it’s the operators in the driver’s seat as they lay out their requirements for advancing virtualization deployments.

With a diverse mix of operators, vendors, standards organizations and others who form the broad ecosystem for virtualization, there are bound to be widely divergent views on what the industry should do, when it should do it and how it should do it. But one thing seems clear: it’s going to be the operators that really drive what happens with SDN and NFV.

Operators are the ones taking the risk, stretching their budgets and expending the energy and resources to move down the virtualization road. And while the benefits of SDN and NFV are crystal clear, the path to realize then doesn’t necessarily follow a straight line.

According to Michael Howard, Senior Research Director, Carrier Networks, at IHS, there are three distinct markets within SDN and NFV: carrier SDN, data center and enterprise SDN and NFV. According to Howard’s research, of a projected total $30 billion combined market in 2019, only $6 billion will be new spend, with the rest constituting existing or displaced numbers.

Specifically, within the SDN space, only 25 percent of spending in 2019 will be new, going toward things like orchestration and controllers, network applications and outsourced services. Only 10 percent of NFV spending will be new, constituting NFV MANO and outsourced services.

So the market is pushing ahead but in unexpected ways. Howard went on to say that there are two primary drivers and two primary barriers to carrier SDN and NFV. He cited drivers as service agility for quicker time to revenue and a global view across multi-domain, multi-vendor networks. For barriers, he mentioned that the software is not yet carrier grade as well as ongoing concerns around how to interoperate both physical and virtual functions in existing networks.

Sticking with the subject of carriers, Howard also said that carriers are clamoring for support of the NETCONF protocol and YANG data modeling language, which he said are on their way as vendors ramp up including them in routers, Carrier Ethernet switches and optical transport products.

The Operators’ Side of the Story
Continuing on the subject of what carriers are doing, Hiroshi Nakamura, Senior Vice President of R&D Strategy at NTT DOCOMO presented an update of his company’s plans for virtualization, saying that he expects to have a commercial vEPC deployment in place by March 2016. This follows on from a proof of concept in early 2014 involving three vendors, and an expanded version later in the year that added three additional vendors to the project.

Nakamura added that standardization is necessary to realize a multi-vendor environment, which is very important to the operator. He said standard interfaces to enable multi-vendor apps and interfaces between existing BSS/OSS will need to be available for large-scale deployments.

He went on to say that in the future, he’d like to see the extension of SDN across data centers in order to get more usage out of resources, especially in the case of natural disasters, something that hit DOCOMO’s home country of Japan extremely hard during the 2011 earthquake. Nakamura said traffic volume on the carrier’s network spiked 60 times above normal, which DOCOMO couldn’t support.

He closed by saying SDN and NFV can be put into practice today, and operators do not need to wait until 5G deployments.

Mirko Voltolini, VP Technology and Architecture at Colt, said that his company started its transformation project in 2009, going from a very siloed approach to one that would support multiple vendors, which seems to be a common theme among operators. Colt’s project, called Novitas, will enable network services to be used, provisioned and orchestrated in real time and on demand with resulting reduced costs, improved time to market and the ability to turn up new services in a more agile manner. This massive project will impact all aspects of Colt’s business but will result in its customers having the ability to self-provision services in near real time or real time with flexible services.

As operators make their demands known, the rest of the industry is taking notice. With major transformation projects already underway at many organizations, it’ll take a lot of cooperation and collaboration to make the shift to a virtualized infrastructure.

*NetCracker Technology submits this article live from the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress

Partnerships, Openness Characterize Next Phases of Virtualization

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At SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, operators, vendors and standards organizations come together to take SDN and NFV to the next level.

If there was any commonality among the diverse set of speakers at the plenary session during SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf, it revolved around the twin themes of open standards and environments and strong partnerships to move virtualization forward at a rapid pace.

Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), kicked off the morning sessions by saying that while the SDN value proposition hasn’t changed – making and saving money – the trend is now more on the making money side, especially on the part of enterprises. But operators are also getting into the mix with Open SDN deployments and other projects based on open source.

In fact, Axel Clauberg, VP of Aggregation, Transport, IP & Fixed Access at Deutsche Telekom, said it’s an open world, not a proprietary one, something the operator is taking into consideration as it plans and rolls out an ambitious slate of projects including cloud VPN. Clauberg added that even if SDN and NFV are relatively young technologies, especially compared to the decades-old IP, a lot has happened in just the past few years with the industry going from SDN getting into the spotlight in 2011; the birth of NFV in 2013; proofs of concept in 2013 and 2014; and finally, commercial deployments in 2015.

David Amzallag, Head of Network Virtualization, SDN & NFV, at Vodafone, discussed open interfaces and said that without a clear strategy and effort, SDN and NFV won’t become a reality. He added that Vodafone has an ambitious goal of delivering a single VPN product for all of its operations worldwide, something that will not be possible without a close relationship with vendors and other partners.

Vodafone operates in dozens of countries, making the operator’s transformation to virtualization very challenging as a project of this magnitude touches everything from budget to human resources. Amzallag said his organization is looking toward multi-vendor design and implementation, because bringing in several vendors can only have a positive impact on Vodafone’s network, services and products, and therefore to customers.

Echoing the need for partnerships and cooperation, Noel Foret, VP of Network Control at Orange, said that ecosystem fragmentation is a real risk and to avoid it standardization will need to play a larger role. Orange’s goal is to implement a fully distributed cloud working with SDN, or as Foret put it, a connected cloud, a massive undertaking that will require working with partners to achieve the plug-and-play environment he’s looking for.

Open to the Future
With a veritable alphabet soup of open source organizations present this week, it can be challenging to determine which group is focused on what, who’s involved in each effort and which are considered more standard than others. What seems clear is that vendors and operators alike see value in open source and the benefits of being involved in a larger effort alongside partners and competitors.

No one entity can go it alone in the complex world of virtualization. It will take the combined efforts of operators, vendors, standards organizations and other partners to make that next major push toward taking SDN and NFV to the next level in large-scale production deployments.

*NetCracker Technology submits this article live from the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress

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